RT @hashdex: "Index investing is and tried a tested way to invest in other asset classes, like tech, it shouldn't be any different in crypt…

Great moment!

Great time today speaking with German investors, bankers, and asset managers. As usual, people don't know how early we are - most of tradfi is still in the baby steps of crypto adoption.

Victor Hugo once wrote that “Nothing else in the world...not all the armies...is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” This is one of the many famous adages that we could use to explain why Bitcoin has reached the US$100K mark. Those watching it tend to fall into two camps - “How is this still going on", on one hand, and “It's just the beginning” on the other. I'm firmly in camp 2, of course, and I've had the chance to meet countless people on both sides (and helped convert a bunch to group 2) in the almost 7 years since @hashdex's inception. This particular experience has given us a front row seat in one of the most interesting experiments in financial psychology in human history, and also in how biases work - even among very intelligent and well-informed people. We've seen it all - from an 80-year old investor who believed in our crypto thesis when Bitcoin was around US$4k, to young bankers that even today believe this “has no intrinsic value” or some other justification not to go deeper. And “going deeper” is what any reasonably intelligent person has to do to understand where all of this is coming from, unless they want to become the personification of the meme below. Knowing some variation of this meme, actually, is a good litmus test for how connected a person is to the zeitgeist. Some see it almost daily, and many others have no idea of what it is. The first group tends to be excessively online (not on Linkedin 🙂), but many of them have realized for a few years that: (i) the institutions, rituals, and paradigms that shaped our worldview in the 90's/2000's have been in an accelerated erosion process; and that (ii) because of such erosion, it's healthy to assume the future won't look like the past, and that things ahead may get very chaotic/unpredictable/surprising - the most ironic outcome is the most likely. Since we don't know what's going to happen, the logical stance is to be very open-minded and actively try to learn more about a bunch of random subjects that somehow connect down the road. This has been the mark of crypto investors - curiosity and the willingness to risk their money on an idea. They've been well-rewarded for their courage, paying the price of some very bumpy sections along the path. Beyond any intellectualization for why they decided to invest, they likely share the intuition that there's something wrong with the way money works. That's the zeitgeist, and societal forces will continue to push things until they break or change. Bitcoin plays an important role in that future, as does crypto more generally. For those who still don't understand crypto: there's still time to learn, and abundant information out there. Give yourself a few hours to go down the rabbit hole, and you'll be surprised. Finally, to our almost 290k investors: thanks for your trust and the incredible partnership along this crazy ride. It's been an honor to help you stack sats. Go out and celebrate tonight - you know you deserve it!

Citizens of all Western democracies should pay close attention to what's happening in Brazil right now - it's the canary in the coal mine for what may happen with some individual rights we take for granted, including the open internet. VAMO BRASIL

Great milestone for us!

Now there's data backing up what we knew all along